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Abstract Vowel fronting refers to a shift in the place of articulation of a vowel (i.e., the position of the highest point of the tongue during its pronunciation) to one further forward in the mouth. Vowel fronting refers to a shift in the place of articulation of a vowel (i.e., the position of the highest point of the tongue during its pronunciation) to one further forward in the mouth. Technically any of the changes which involve the raising of a front vowel (e.g. that of  ē [ɛː] > [e̝ː] > [iː] in Koine) could also be classed as fronting, since height correlates with ‘frontne…

Abstract The term syncope refers to the loss of a medial, usually unaccented vowel. Syncope is the loss of a medial, usually unaccented vowel, frequently associated with the effects of a stress accent. Although not common in Greek while the accent was one of pitch (Accentuation), there are isolated early examples, including: (i) the aorist stem of érkhomai ‘go, come’, elth- < eluth-, the latter already an archaism in Homer preserved only in the indicative ḗluthon and infinitive elutheîn; (ii) éstai ‘he will be’ < és( s) etai, again already in Homer; (iii) in Attic, oîmai ‘I think’ < oíomai. …

Abstract (Germ. Junggrammatische Richtung, Junggrammatiker) A school of historical linguists originating in Leipzig in the 1870s primarily remembered for formulating what is today known as the Neogrammarian Regularity Hypothesis, viz. that sound change, when motivated and conditioned only by phonetic factors, is regular and exceptionless at a given time and in a given speech community; and that apparent exceptions can be explained away as the result of other processes. Despite receiving criticism fr…